Professor Adi Shamir ForMemRS

Professor Adi Shamir was born in Israel in 1952, and received his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1977. He is one of the founders of modern cryptography, and had made significant contributions to many of its branches. In 1977 he co-invented (together with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman) the RSA cryptosystem, which remains the best known and most commonly used public key encryption and signature scheme. Among his other inventions are secret sharing schemes, identity-based schemes, Zero-knowledge identification and signature schemes, ring signatures, and a variety of both classical and side-channel attacks on cryptosystems including differential cryptanalysis, cache attacks, bug attacks, and acoustic attacks. For these contributions he received the Pius XI Gold Medal in 1992, the Turing Award in 2002, the Israel Prize in 2008, and the Japan Prize in 2017. He is a member of the Israeli Academy, the US National Academy of Science, the Academia Europaea, the French Academy of Science, and the Royal Society.

Professional position

  • Professor, Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, The Weizmann Institute of Science
Professor Adi Shamir ForMemRS
Elected 2018